Just me, DavoGrande, 6'4' and 285 pounds of love, compassion, honor, decency and humility (stop laughing!), bound together by a framework of principle, mainly the Commandments... so far the scientist/leftists have failed to convince me that there is no God and that He didn't create me... :-)

Friday, December 28, 2007

a) overstated by a press eager for something to cover, a horse race, and NOT eager for conservatives to have an easy time of it, or

b) driven by blind following of an Evangelical Christian Baptist preacher no matter what he says or believes, just because Christians want to vote for a Christian.

The first one is a given, and I expect it, much as I detest it.

The second one is a problem for me. I would be really disturbed to learn that Christians were organized and pulling for this guy simply because he's a preacher. C. S. Lewis always said that being a Christian is not automatically a qualification for any sort of leadership and that it does not in itself convey any special qualities or skills or experiences to do any particular job.

Huckabee, folks, is a weasel. He's crafty, sneaky, and not very nice. And he is no conservative, not on anything besides abortion anyway, and that issue has always been a Christian issue rather than a conservative one.

Huckabee said "I don't know much about Mormonism... "then lightly tossed in "don't Mormons believe Jesus and the devil are brothers?"

It isn't the contemptible sneakiness of this over-the-shoulder shot that bothers me most; it's the lie he told right before it.

He DOES know much about Mormonism, given he was a keynote speaker at an SBC meeting in Salt Lake City nine years ago. The meeting specifically addressed Mormonism, provoking them by having the meeting in THEIR town, distributing materials that were negative about them, sending MISSIONARIES for heaven's sake, to convert the Mormon savages into decent Christian people.

Huckabee was the man chosen to make the meeting's OPENING SPEECH. When he says he doesn't know much about Mormonism, HE"S LYING.

He also has no concept of the difference between taxpayer funds and charitable donations. He seems to think that whenever it's time to be compassionate, the way to do it is to take great gulps of money from the public treasury and pass it around.

Conservatism says government shouldn't be in that business, or at least should do it as little as possible. We want lower taxes so that our charitable efforts, already the best in the world by a long shot, can be even better; but we DO NOT want taxpayer money being used for things the taxpayers themselves might object to, loudly. If there is a genuine cause for compassion, then encourage the people to raise charitable funds to address it, and do it outside government, among other reasons so that it can be more efficient, less wasteful of money.

Speaking of money, he's got a fondness for it. He's STILL taking cash for speeches, folks, even as he runs for President. This is the first time in our history that such a thing has been done. Huckabee makes many times his salary as governor of Arkansas by questionable means that might well be interpreted as influence peddling. He rivals the Clintons in terms of the large scale acceptance of expensive gifts while still in office.

He takes speech money from at least one medical group that researches with human embryos, for example. This from a man who says he opposes embryonic stem cell research because it kills babies. Because it's like abortion, which he says he's against. But he is $50,000 richer, as far as we KNOW, by doing speaking engagements for which they were the underwriters. It could be more.

He's also a genuine kindergartener at foreign policy. Iran's mullahs have announced they hope he wins. That's all I need to know.

And just today, I read the 'icing on the cake', the 'coup de gras' story that settled my view of him as a weasel. He went hunting, you see, for pheasants. When a group of reporters flushed a couple of birds, Huckabee's group (presumably including him) blasted away at the birds, directly over the heads of the startled reporters. A Dick Cheney moment it was not; in Cheney's case, the OTHER guy was the one who violated hunting protocol by moving into the wrong place, to where Cheney couldn't see him until it was too late.

But Huckabee's group gleefully fired away even though the reporters were plainly right in front of them. Those guys were upset about it, but nobody was hit.

I do not like Mike Huckabee, and the press's insistence that he's 'likeable' rubs me wrong. It's something else that's happening here, and I suspect it's a Christian grass roots organizational thing designed to teach the other candidates not to take them too lightly.

But I will NEVER like Mike Huckabee.

I like Romney. People who say he's too polished and slick also complain that Bush is too rough around the edges and not polished ENOUGH. They call Romney a flipper on lots of issues, a latecomer to the conservative ranks, but isn't he moving the RIGHT WAY? Isn't he maturing and becoming a better person? Why should we complain about changes when he's changing in the RIGHT DIRECTION?

I like Rudy. He's solid on most of my issues, and on abortion, he's already repeatedly said he'd nominate strict constitutionalist judges, which is another way of saying he'd set things up so that Roe could be overturned later. He's got lots of friends and supporters who would not countenance a flip from him on this issue, but he's already spoken to conservatives about it through his remarks on nominating those judges. I only hope those people aren't too dimwitted to get it. Anyway, the president has no power to veto Roe Vs. Wade. It is established law, and he is not a legislator. All he can do is appoint the right judges, and he repeatedly promises he will do so.

I do NOT like McCain. He displayed bilious contempt for ordinary people during that whole immigration thing, along with a complete inability to even understand our complaints. And his 'campaign finance reform' made the beast that is George Soros a factor to be reckoned with, in my opinion a giant step backward in American campaigns. His reform bill also removed the right of free speech from citizens who wish to speak on our airwaves about our elections within a month or two of them. Grotesque, anti-American, damaging to the nation. McCain isn't just a maverick, he's unstable and crazy.

I like Fred, and hope he plays a part in this, but I don't think he'll win. His issue stands are just not well enough known. No fire catching on there.

Duncan Hunter has not caught even the slightest spark of fire, but his is the most Reagan-like approach of any Republican candidates. Too bad he's a bit flat and uninteresting on TV.

The Huckaweasel seems to be more and more transparent over the passage of time, and lets hope by the caucuses he's at least moderately well known to be a weasel. I suspect he will be.

There is a company making solar panels whose manufacturing cost, and thus retail cost, will make them competitive with traditional sources of electricity.

Is this the breakthrough we conservatives have been waiting for? So far, the solutions have always been more expensive than traditional energy, oil and coal and whatnot, and thus would require taxing people into obedience. That, of course, is economically destructive and makes the solution NOT a solution at all.

But if these panels have any kind of durability at all, I would seriously consider putting them on MY roof, assuming my tyrannical homeowners association would even take my phone call.

I would love to have a self sufficient home, powered without the grid, or at least offsetting the grid so that my expenses drop to near zero.

But I'm not going to spend $150,000 on it, because it would take longer than my remaining lifespan to pay off the investment.

That's just real world economics.

The lowest cost form of energy is the one that will remain the most popular. If some leftist taxes it punitively to make some other source of energy 'cost less', the economic damage will make EVERYTHING cost more. It has to be real, actually less expensive, not falsely so.

Everywhere a Muslim deigns to grant the West his considered opinion on religion and history, it always seems to include a mention, however oblique, of what Christianity did to Islam several hundred years ago.

They have a long memory, it is said. But they always ignore the present while chewing on the past.

Here's a classic example; a column by a Muslim who cannot understand how Tony Blair could possibly become a Catholic. After all, he has said good things about Islam, and that mean old Catholic church has done some awful things.... how could Blair self-identify with pedophiles, anti-science Popes, gays in the priesthood, yada yada?

Here's my favorite paragraph--

Islam certainly stands for tolerance and demonstrates this by giving a special status (!?!?) to the Christians and Jews calling them people of the Book - Ahl al-Kitab. Christianity does not do the same. Blair reminded us that "the standard-bearers of tolerance in the early Middle Ages were far more likely to be found in Muslim lands than in Christian ones". Yes, but why has Mr Blair converted to Catholicism? Surely he stands for tolerance, progress and good governance.

If Christianity, anywhere, can be found to levy extra taxes on people for not being Christian, to officially call them second class citizens, I'd like to know where it is.

If Christian society is so intolerant, I'd like to know why so many Jews live here in the States, and why so few Jews still remain in those 'tolerant' Islamic countries. Remain there, remain alive, whichever.

If a Christian society can be found anywhere that is less tolerant of other religions, other cultures, homosexuality, adultery and public dancing than Islamic society is, I'd like to know.

If I may, the standard-bearers of tolerance NOW, unlike in the early Middle Ages (I grant this stipulation but it is arguable), are JUDEO-CHRISTIAN societies. And anywhere that Christianity is losing its influence, those societies are rapidly becoming ISLAMIC ones, so the tolerance question is nearing irrelevance.

Read the whole thing, and then imagine a public figure converting to Islam and a columnist writing that he cannot understand this, because Islam has so much baggage, so many wrongdoers, so much evil attached to its name.

The columnist would presently be living under an assumed name, fearing for his life and the lives of his family.

Thursday, December 27, 2007

"A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice."

Lots of sensible people have already noted that the theory of Manmade Catastrophic Global Warming appears to be confirmed, in the eyes of its proponents, by almost any weather event or scientific datum. It seems sometimes there is NO weather pattern or scientific measurement that cannot be explained by the anthropogenic global warming theory.

I've been covering a lot of ground on this tonight, looking at lots of stories and websites and databanks; it is a subject in which I have no professional expertise at all, so I won't attempt to make scientific arguments myself.

Nor, since I don't have much time to refine this post, will I hammer you with a bunch of links.

It will suffice for me to use this post as a sort of bookmark, as we are now in the final week of 2007.

You see, I've found a lot of blogs and other conversations amongst experts, hobbyists and interested people about the solar cycle, the sunspots-- or lack of them.

At present there are none. And it has been this way for a long long time, TOO long in fact.

For hundreds of years the solar cycle has been on an 11 year basis, with almost no variation.

If the next cycle begins when predicted, it will be more like 13 years. And recent predictions have been proven wrong with each passing month.

The last time we had an extended solar flat cycle was about 300 years ago, and it got so cold on this planet that crops failed and generations died of starvation.

Just google "Maunder minimum" and go from there, if you have a few minutes to spare.

IF the planet gets warmer, more things can grow, including the plants and animals we eat. Plants require sunlight and warmth, and animals eat plants. It is an adjustment we can all handle.

We can move to higher ground, we can build with better codes and live through hurricanes, etc etc yada yada. (assuming their arguments about those things are correct.)

But how can we generate enough energy to create sunlight to grow crops? It's a ridiculous thought.

Global cooling would be devastating to the human race. Global warming, not so much.

There is nothing to debate here, except to argue for warming or cooling. Right now, the warming guys are better organized and are making more money off it (and poised to make LOTS more in the form of worldwide taxation, mainly aimed at America), which is better motivation. But the cooling guys are coming up hard down the stretch, as the sun just sits there. Silent.

Spotless.

For way too long. The cycle was to start last spring. Now nobody knows, because the normal indicators are absent. This past winter set records all over the world for cold, in the northern hemisphere and then through June July August in the southern. Snow in Peru, first time since 1918. Frozen vineyards in New Zealand, new cold records broken every few days in Australia.

And we all know how well the new winter is going here in the States. More than half the country is presently under ice or snow, with record snowfalls already recorded from one end of the country to the other, as well as several notable new record lows.

No sunspots. No indication of the beginning of a new cycle, which was first noticed in 2006 and has attracted more and more attention as the dead time continues.

Just look around, do some googling. Even I wouldn't enjoy the exposing of the Gore fraud if it came with this kind of price tag, genuine human misery on a large scale.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Non-golfers will not be interested by this tale, nor will most golfers I guess... but blogs are for telling exactly that kind of story, so here goes--

I was driving around Dallas on Saturday and heard that British Open champion Todd Hamilton from the 2004 event was very near, and would be there for a couple of hours.

I changed my unimportant morning plan and went to meet him.

When I arrived, the room was filled with a couple dozen people like me-- middle-aged men, slightly overweight and underhaired, standing in rapt attention with cell phone cams at the ready.

There was one difference-- I had forgotten the phone when I left the house. No photos were saved of this next moment.....

I leaned over the broadcast table where Hamilton and the hosts were swapping golf stories, examining the Claret Jug (Todd had brought his with him for this event), reading all the tiny engravings of all the great names (did you know that Bobby Locke is on the trophy as A. D. Locke?), and Todd Hamilton smiled, leaned over, picked it up and handed it to me.

I turned to the wall of photographers with my Claret Jug in hand, kissing it from afar, waving at the crowd, "thank you, thank you" while the flashes popped--

Alright, I told you this story wouldn't be interesting.

But now, I, Dave Perkins, occasional holder of a single digit handicap (it's been as low as 4, but not recently), have walked the hallowed goat-track fairways of St. Andrews' Auld Course; I have played eighteen holes of immensely difficult golf at Royal St. George, the Open rota course in Kent in southeastern England (shot 84, first time there, didn't have caddie, just good luck, good day) and now, now I have held the Claret Jug in my hands, taken from the hands of the Champion Golfer for 2004.

Todd Hamilton, btw, turned out to be a good guy, local DFW guy, grew up in Illinois but likes Texas and doesn't plan to leave. He's even played my own course, Hackberry Creek in Las Colinas.

Hamilton is an interesting story. As a kid in a small town in Illinois, he grew up playing golf at a high school that had no golf team. He entered school tournaments as an independent, and in that manner, alone and unsubsidized, he won two straight Illinois championships. Those Fighting Todds from Hamilton High were at the top of their game, eh?

His next claim to fame, which even he didn't know (the radio hosts had googled this and were informed), was that he was the all time money leader on the Japanese tour among the gaijin, the foreigners. Todd Hamilton, the best Japanese player ever to be NOT Japanese. Sort of.

And he won his PGA tour card at 38, a very old rookie indeed. That was the year he won the Open.

It wasn't a brush with greatness, in the classical sense; more like an oblique thump against the shin bone of something that had brushed greatness recently.

But avid, rabid golfers will know exactly what I felt. It was one of those moments when real golf legend floats down from the mists of the mythology and settles as simple dry fact, a moment when the giants who move in those shadows of the myth sit down and have a cup of coffee with you and just yak.

Todd Hamilton is kind of shy, probably not the guy who'll lead a room either in prayer or in drunken song. And he's not the best golfer around, year in and year out.

But for those four days in September 2004, Todd Hamilton was more than a man... he joined the list of faces who will flash back at us down through the decades, the men who conquered all the other conquerors, and vanquished a great golf course too-- the men who are called "Open Champions"......

Friday, December 21, 2007

So 400 very credible scientists, many of whom were involved in some way with the IPCC report on climate change that Algore is so fond of, have signed off on a letter that says in essence the 'consensus' is a myth, that the science isn't anywhere near settled, and that too many political influences are driving these catastrophic fear-mongering global warming claims.

Like the previous post says, the consensus argument is over. Global Warming, maybe, and even that is questionable after six years of NON warming and two years of no sunspots, but Man Made Catastrophic Global Warming a la "inconvenient truth" is just speculation, upon which good scientists disagree on scientific principle.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Here is a quicktime movie of the sun, one of the several types of imaging with which NASA observes and logs solar flares, sunspots. This video represents the sun exactly eight years ago, December 1999.

Remember, the liberals insist that 2001 was the hottest year on record. The math was later corrected by NASA and we learned that 1934 was actually the hottest, and then someone decided it needed MORE correcting and said they were equal. That's from memory as I write this, but it's generally accurate.

So the video from 1999 is representative of increasing global temps, which were to peak only two years later.

Whereas the present day video image comes with a note of caution; sunspots come in 11 year cycles, and the present trough is too long by at least a year. In other words, the next cycle has not begun on time, and at present nobody can say WHEN it will begin.

Or if.

And, inconveniently for Algore, the temperatures are NOT increasing from 2001 to the present, rather they are DROPPING.

Obviously the universe has not read the IPCC report. It is simply not obeying the leftists.

Now you can see with your own eyes that the SUN is amazingly coherent with global temps, that solar activity is very busy when it's hot and NOT so busy when it's NOT so hot.

As we endure the mindless and/or duplicitous complaints from the left about waterboarding and Gitmo and the cruelty of Dick Cheney and the CIA (except for the noble Valerie Plame) and the American armed forces, it helps now and then to remind ourselves of the DIFFERENCE between us and them.

As I've said for years, I'm still waiting for the discovery of the Bush mass graves... somewhere in Texas, perhaps, or in the Wyoming desert, undiscovered by the courageous New York Times as yet, but one day they'll be found and they'll lead on page one above the fold and Bush will get the calumny and ignominy and prison cell he DESERVES, the evil war criminal!

And the Times will once again be heroes, brave upholders of the high standards of the America they love... whatever that is....

Meanwhile the only stories of torture and murder and fear and misery are coming from the al Qaeda side, blast our bad luck. Oh well, we'll just NOT talk about those, and keep working on finding those Bush mass graves.

Friday, December 14, 2007

What are those journo types out there in media land really thinking about the new citizen journalism movement?

DO they welcome the competition? Do they embrace the opportunity to improve themselves by forging in the fires of battle?

Or do they just dismiss it with contempt for the 'regular people' who haven't had the TRAINING, the EXPERIENCE, the ETHICAL backgrounding, and cannot POSSIBLY meet the standards of 'professional' journalism.....?

Key sentence -- "the news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend."

As if the news industry was some sort of government regulatory agency, or congress or something.

That is how they think of themselves, of course, and in a world of their making, that is what they would BE. Bloody frightening.

'Advocates argue that the acts of collecting and distributing makes these people "journalists." This is like saying someone who carries a scalpel is a "citizen surgeon" or someone who can read a law book is a "citizen lawyer." Tools are merely that. Education, skill and standards are really what make people into trusted (?) professionals. Information without journalistic standards is called gossip'.

Well, excuse us for believing that, with the education this great country provides, we're qualified to write complete sentences that communicate ideas, or that we're qualified to look at something and describe it. Good grief, do these people have an overinflated, hyper-egotistical view of themselves or what? "the act of collecting and distributing" facts and information IS journalism, and there is nothing more to it than that.

Unless he's talking about op-ed journalism, which has little to do with facts and a lot to do with opinion. Like that other thing, we've all got one.

'But unlike those other professions, journalism — at least in the United States — has never adopted uniform self-regulating standards (there's a reason-- they can't maintain a standard that isn't laughable). There are commonly accepted ethical principals — two source confirmation of controversial information or the balanced reporting of both sides of a story, for example, but adhering to the principals is voluntary. '

As high a level of function as this man is apparently claiming to have, one might think a similarly high standard of SPELLING might apply-- but no.

It's PRINCIPLES, you arrogant jerk. Unless you meant highly ethical school officials, which I doubt.

He put it in that paragraph twice-- principals. HAH.

This man believes that journalists should regulate journalism, so standards will be adhered to, and he can't even spell. Nor can the presumptive editors, 'fact checkers', layers of reviewers, etc.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Children like Aqsa Parvez, who has died in the hospital after being strangled by her own father.

Because she didn't want to wear the hijab, in Canada.

Liberals want to tell us, especially the Christians among us, that all cultures are morally equivalent, and that it's arrogant to claim that ours is superior to any other.

I hereby join the voices of sanity and reason and all that's human in declaring that our culture, rap music and all, is better than fundamentalist Islam.

We have children who are raised badly. We have children who have less than a complete understanding of decency and morality. We have children who are led by our entertainment culture to be promiscuous.

We have lots of problems among our young people.

But we do not, as punishment or for 'justice and honor', MURDER OUR OWN CHILDREN.

(Except at the abortion mill, but then that's not really about the children who die; it's about the guilt-ridden and morally deficient parents who kill them. Another story for another post.)

Therefore, milud, I submit that, as we do not murder our own children to 'redeem the honor of our families', and that in fact fundamentalist Muslims DO murder their own children in order to return to their family state of 'honor', fundamentalist Islam is in fact a markedly inferior culture to our own in MORAL terms.

They are barbaric and cruel and, with the capacity to murder their OWN CHILDREN, they are something like EVIL.

I wonder if they'll give the Muslims a religious exemption. Seriously. Because from what I've seen, the left is just afraid enough of Muslims to avoid any real contention with them, as doubtless would occur if they were told they must pay to reproduce. It is the will of Allah that new Muslims enter this world in great number, they'd say, and your tax is a blight on Islam and accursed by Allah. The first government agent who tries to collect will lose his head in the transaction, and that will be IT.

Think about it.

In the good old days, children were a blessing and an assurance of the future of a society and a nation. Thats why some European nations are trying to hard to relight the fire of reproduction amongst their citizens, notably Italy. They are looking at population drops, and their socialism will only continue to be funded by the importation of workers,--notably Muslims these days-- with attendant consequences.

And it is the Muslims, primarily, who have not forgotten that children mean the future of a culture. They earnestly and busily reproduce with that in mind.

"I kind of thought of the defence force (army) as being full of meatheads, not too bright, couldn't do anything else. It's the truth, it's what I thought. I'm only happy to say that now because I don't think that any more."

At least he is pleased to discover the troops are capable, smart, decent and whole people.

Our own showbiz types, if they EVER learn this, tend to keep it to themselves.

Monday, December 10, 2007

Powerline today notes that the death toll in the shootings in those two Colorado church settings exceeds the sum total of all 'hate crimes' against Muslims committed in the United States in the six years after September 11th.

I'm for the founding of the Christian equivalent of CAIR, so we can go on endless TV shows every time a Christian is killed, attacked or glared at, and blame anti-Christian forces and bigotry and racism (I know, but hey, it works for them).

The contrast Powerline has given us makes it clear that, for all the noise and whining from the Muslim "victim groups", they really aren't the victim of anything in particular, before or after 9/11. Nor are Jews, blacks or gays subject to any rise in hate-- quite the opposite. Remember almost all the so called hate crimes of the past few years have turned out to be faked by liberals trying to 'raise awareness of hate crimes' that aren't actually happening.

Meanwhile the real rise in hate, and hate crimes, is pretty much targeted at Christians. Church shootings are on the increase. Christians are called all sorts of ugly names and excluded from participation in campus life on several levels, political candidates are demanded to explain theological fine points of their faiths in media interviews, and overall the Christian faith is less tolerated and more suspected than ever in the life of this country.

So much of European history comes down, as in the case of the Dreyfus affair, to "it must have been the dirty Jew! He did it! It makes sense, after all you can't trust the scum, they're just out to steal from us all! Kill the Jew!!"

Dreyfus was, of course, innocent, and a proper legal exercise would have determined this in short order. However, he was a Jew, and the men trying to hide the crime and protect their reputations made a quick decision to blame it on the Jew, simply because the public would accept that.

And they did. And Dreyfus spent years in a dreadful penal colony, innocent but in chains, crying the tears of the bewildered victim of Jew hatred....

And he was a towering example of a French people, like the rest of the Europeans, easy to convince of a Jew's guilt, easy to blame them for all that went wrong, easy to kick them around and treat them badly because it's all their own fault after all, skulking around stealing money and so forth... all the stereotypes were in play and still are, of the money-grubbing usurer Jew who gets rich off the backs of hard workers of a more noble heritage...

Anti-Semitism had then been around Europe for hundreds of years, expressing itself in the occasional mass-murder of Jews called a Pogrom, and now and then in a national exile driven by local politics. Dreyfus was a new level, an entire nation, 99% or more of the citizenship, completely certain that an innocent man was guilty simply because he was Jewish.

I bring up these points of fairly recent history to offer the chance to think about what happened before, as the signs of it happening again are becoming less and less easy to avoid. America is unlikely to erupt in a wave of antisemitism-- there are too many liberal and secular Jews here, and they are a part of every level of society-- but anti-Christianity can certainly be seen crawling around, somewhere between infancy and its first upright steps.

It was in the Soviet Union that children were encouraged to look under their parents' beds and report to 'the State' if they kept a bible. It was an act of treason to have an allegiance, even a spiritual one, other than 'the State'.

It isn't just the Israelis who are torqued about this stupid NIE treachery-- The Brits aren't too happy with it either. Apparently they were still working on the basis of reality-- that the Iranians are clever and deceptive and that there is no good reason for them to have given up on their nuclear plans-- and that there is NO DIFFERENCE between a civilian nuclear enrichment program and a military one, especially since they've already finished and deployed their long range missiles. All they need do is assemble a bomb, put it in a warhead, and bolt the warhead to the missile.

And if they've already got the fuel, that's only a matter of a few weeks of work.

And they are STILL MAKING THE FUEL. They've never stopped, and the NIE admits this.

Clearly the entire world understands that the NIE was issued by leftists in the CIA, former Staties who have opposed Bush from the beginning, for the express purpose of preventing him from being able to use American intelligence as a reason for mounting an attack on Iranian nuclear works.

The Brits say that makes the job of containing Iran harder, since they no longer fear an attack from the United States. Forceful diplomacy must have threats behind it or the 'force' part is impotent.

And now the Mad Mullahs are celebrating, certain that America will never attack them, and simply planning for what they think will be the easier stuff, like an Israeli attack-- for which the response will be to destroy Israel. Just like they've planned from the beginning.

I truly wonder if our leftoid agency types want to live in the world they are creating. They seem to believe there's no such thing as evil, and that everything is negotiable.

But what really cracks me up about this article is the scientific explanation for fewer hurricanes.

Essentially, they say we WOULD have had more hurricanes except for the cooler water.

Um, isn't cooler water factored into hurricane forecasts? One would think so, since it's the primary cause of them.

Combine this story's unintentional admission that the sea water is cooler with what I read last week about solar activity (pretty much zero right now, for an uncomfortably long period of time), and one might just get the sense that solar activity is the prime dictator of water temperature, therefore of hurricanes. Less sunspots, fewer hurricanes, cooler water... the only thing I'm missing here is the 'warming' part. Not happening.

Remember, the last time sunspots ceased for a long time was called the "little ice age" for a reason. Southern England and western France covered in permafrost for a generation, no crops, mass starvation, etc. It happened a few hundred years back, and there's been no extended time without sunspots since-- until NOW.

The next eleven year sunspot cycle should have started a year ago, and now it's been pushed back in forecast terms to 2009, TWO years late.

The sun makes heat. Sunspots (flares of excess radiation) make MORE heat. No sunspots, less heat, cooler seawater, fewer hurricanes, no global warming, HELLO!?!?! Is anybody out there? This isn't rocket OR climate science here, it's just common sense.

Here's Helen Thomas appearing on the Huffington Post; she is the last member of the press corps who still believes "real" journalists are distinguishable from wannabe blogger-types by their superior ethics.

Do you think technology is changing [journalism]? That a good reporter will always find a venue because there are so many media outlets now?

No, but I do think it is kind of sad when everybody who owns a laptop thinks they're a journalist and doesn't understand the ethics. We do have to have some sense of what's right and wrong in this job. Of how far we can go. We don't make accusations without absolute proof. We're not prosecutors. We don't assume.(Dan Rather and the TNG fake documents, the explosives at al Qaqaa that didn't actually disappear, the TNR Scott Beauchamp fake stories about soldiers' cruelty, the Marine massacre of innocents in that Iraqi village that didn't happen, the corpses stacked like cordwood at the Superdome in 2005, John Kerry's phony record in Vietnam, and the list goes on and on and on-ed.)

So if there's this amateur league of journalists out there, trying to do what you do...

It's dangerous.

Without that amateur league of journalists, it's astonishing to think what the public would NOT know, or what the public WOULD know but is not TRUE.

the kid who was beaten to within an inch of his life has filed lawsuits against the Jena Six and one other kid, and some other people too, including school district worthies.

This news story features a couple of lies/misleading statements regarding the initial incidents.

It claims the beating was preceded by racial incidents, including three white students hanging nooses from a tree.

Surprising that the story didn't declare the tree to be 'whites only'. It wasn't, of course, and students are baffled as to why anyone referred to it that way.

But the story did claim it was racism that hung those nooses, and it did imply that the 'noose incident' precipitated the beatings.

The truth of the matter, as has now been well proven:

The nooses were a joke about the television show 'Lonesome Dove', and the kids who hung the nooses were completely unaware that the noose was any kind of symbol of racism.

They're too young to know, which in my view is wonderful proof of how far we've come.

It was 'goofing around'. They hadn't a clue.

As for the implied cause and effect, the beating took place FOUR MONTHS after the non-racial incident of the nooses, and had NOTHING to do with it. The ringleader of the six has an established record of violent crimes, and the others are no angels either.

Once a set of facts is successfully misrepresented in the major news media, it's over. The truth will NEVER be admitted, and the lies will be told and retold for years.

A couple of years ago, I blogged (somewhere :-) about a group of Russian scientists who were willing to bet what little money they had that in ten years the world would be COOLER, not warmer. They were proponents of the theory that the sun has much more to do with global temperature cycles than the atmosphere.

Naturally, loudmouthed pseudo-intellectual Manmade Catastrophic Global Warming proponents have all their complicated forecast models (none of which can predict the weather next week, let alone in ten years), and in NONE of them is cyclical solar activity even FACTORED.

Well, the sun, in spite of being a great light source, doesn't read what Gore and his gang are writing. It seems to be on its own schedule, and that has some folks concerned that-- you guessed it-- over the next several years it could get cooler. No, COLDER.

Sunspots have ceased, and the next cycle of sunspots is now long overdue. and temps are dropping worldwide, albeit not precipitously as yet.

The last time sunspots quit for an extended period, we had 'the little ice age' in the early 17th century, and millions died because crops failed. Southern England was covered in permafrost for a generation.

The next cycle was due at the beginning of this year. Predictions were shifted to early NEXT year, but now those too are to be moved back.

The sun is quiet; TOO quiet. We might well have to start flying MORE, using autos MORE, firing up the leaf-blower even if no leaves are present, just to add to the CO2 level and try to WARM UP this place.

... about the controversial new National Intelligence Estimate is here.

The same guy who now says Iran isn't trying to get nukes said back in July that Iran IS trying to get nukes.

What's changed between then and now? This isn't just a case of a two year old NIE being outdated at present; this is information from just a few months ago, doubtless information that is still used to assess Iran. How is it that just five months ago we were told that Iran was endangering the world with its pursuit of nuclear weapons, but today we are told they haven't been pursuing nuclear weapons for FOUR YEARS?!?!?!

The primary guy, apparently, is a former Statie who was hired back to work in the CIA in a storm of protest from anti-anti-Bush voices. He's a fiery anti-Bush activist.

I'm shocked, shocked that politics should influence intelligence estimates in this country. Shocked, I tell you.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

We've recently seen a proliferation of racist and Nazi slogans, nooses, swastikas and the like, appearing here and there; student dorm rooms, teaching rooms, even a firehouse which had some racial stress among the staff.

And in every such mystery which has been solved of late, the guilty party has turned out to be a liberal.

It's almost always a student trying to call attention to hate crimes-- by faking a hate crime. Or in one case, a black fireman trying to get his white colleagues into trouble-- by hanging a noose at the firehouse, faking an episode of racism.

One would not be misguided to conclude that actual hate crimes are so rare as to be invisible, while faked hate crimes by people with 'good' intentions are rampant.

Now it's spreading. Here's a story about a teacher, a member of the teacher's union, pretending online to be an evil redneck who hates teachers and thinks they should be killed, and wants to remember Dylan and Klebold as heroes for shooting teachers.

What he was planning to do with this self-created 'dangerous situation' we don't yet know. But one thing is certain--

Nobody hates teachers. So his premise was foolish.

As is the premise of every liberal who believes our nation is overrun by hate crimes and racism and brain-dead rednecks shouting yee hah and guzzling beer and using the N word in jokes and so forth and so on... we saw caricatures of such people in more than one CNN YouTube question during the recent Republican debate (remember the goofballs with the guns and the dixie flag?), but tellingly there were no realistic and believeable ones.

They would have put them on the air if they had received them, you can count on that.

yes, there are such people, but they're a relic of times long past-- like a liberal who believes in strong national defense.

You'd think they'd be able to find one or two contemporary examples on which to hang their tinfoil hats, but no. They have to make them up in order to point fingers at them. The actual hate is in their own hearts, not in the America they see.

There will always be a bit of racial tension. People are easily made uncomfortable by that which is different from themselves. One cannot ask people to NOT be people. But most of us do a darn good job with this concept; racism as such hasn't been endemic to our general population for twent years or more. I'm almost fifty, and I can't remember the last time anyone I know said the N word in casual conversation, not because they're afraid of legal action but because it isn't part of the vocabulary of life in my generation.

Nevertheless, every time some liberal fakes a hate crime to 'raise awareness of hate crimes' (that aren't really happening), the MSM dutifully throws out the story, so everyone in America thinks for a couple of days that another hate crime has been committed.

And you have to look HARD to find the follow-up story later, the one that makes the earlier story look like foolishness.

The NIE, the National Intelligence Estimate, was published online practically before the President saw it.

Without high level agents placed inside, without corroboration from independent agents, without much of any real way to know what's going on in Iran, the NIE has now firmly opined that Iran has not been developing nuclear weapons for four years now.

They allow that Iran could restart the process any time, but they believe it is presently idle.

Our intelligence agencies have conducted their version of a coup, going public to show they are firmly opposed to military intervention in Iran, citing the lack of activity of this program as if to say "If Bush goes to war, he won't be able to blame US for it!"

Rarely have I seen this level of opposition to a sitting president by the agencies which are there to serve his administration.

There is no way to know they are right, of course; they were the ones who said Saddam had WMD, along with the same agencies in a dozen other countries. And they are very careful to cover their assertions in a welter of different levels of probability.

Odds are, if Iran wanted to fool these people, it could do so effortlessly. We already know that Syria is a proxy for Iran, and we already know that North Korea was helping Syria build something very very dangerous which was destroyed by Israel a few months ago. It is only sensible to assume Iranian involvement in, or direction of, that project.

Nobody knew about it until a few months before the strike.

In fact, we now know that some Romanians were arrested for trying to sell over a pound of very enriched uranium powder, the product that bombs are made of. Suppose other such sales are taking place? Suppose the Syrians already have this powder, and need only assemble the weapon itself. Iran could stop its centrifuges, just as our intelligence says, and STILL be in possession of a nuclear bomb in a very short time.

This NIE fills me with contempt for the US intelligence services, but it does NOT fill me with confidence about the future safety of the west.

I'm far from a Craig fan; I think he should resign, or be drummed out by Republicans if he doesn't. I don't care if he's gay or not, I just don't want a weasel and a liar to be on our side in the Senate; too easy to blackmail folks like that. Not to mention it's hard to take him seriously when he talks about family values.

Again, I don't care if you're gay, it's not even important to me. But Craig isn't just gay, he's a cruiser, a promiscuous adventurer who seeks sex with strangers in public places. I wouldn't trust anyone, gay or no, who lives that lifestyle and pretends he doesn't.

And of course, on the Dem side they not only don't resign, they get cheers from the podium in the house. And they get reelected again and again. Even the pedophiles. Gerry Studds got an ovation in the house while holding hands with the young man who, while underage, was the object of Studds' affections. Studds was a pedophile.

Monday, December 3, 2007

Huckabee, now leading in some polls in Iowa, has finally drawn scrutiny from some conservative groups, like the Club for Growth (at whom he lashed back by calling them the "Club for Greed"; smooth move, Mikey), and conservatives are less and less happy with what they find.

From his own website, describing the contents of a radio talk show featuring the Guv..

""But the governor did not back down on his positions in support of certain benefits for the children of illegal aliens, such as ..( ).. his proposal to offer scholarships to undocumented children who graduate from an Arkansas high school. (EDITOR'S NOTE: This was not clearly described in the article. Huckabee did not want to "offer scholarships to undocumented children." What he actually supported was allowing them to be eligible to apply for college scholarships if they qualified.)""

The governor doesn't seem to realize that for taxpayer purposes and for citizens' concerns, the two points are the same; Arkansans' children-- whose GPA might be a decimal or two lower than these illegal children-- are going to be missing out on scholarships because they've already been granted to people who are not citizens of Arkansas, or of any other American state-- in this way he punishes innocent young people while claiming he wants to avoid punishing innocent young people. THIS is the point he refuses to grasp.

Huckabee vigorously defends his position, that these children committed no 'sin' or crime and shouldn't be made to pay the price of the crimes of their parents.

Morally, nobody could disagree with this statement. However, it does NOT apply here.

Because the fact is, they do not belong here. If it isn't their fault, then it MUST be admitted that neither is it the fault of the Arkansas taxpayer who must pay the freight for this government largesse, nor is it the fault of the Arkansas student who cannot go to school because the scholarship he needed has gone instead to a student who has no legal right to benefits for American students.

If Huckabee believes that children of illegals should be given things, then he should start a charity and raise funds for these gifts. That is a fine use of his time and passion, and if he is right on the issue, then he should be able to easily raise a lot of money.

But the Arkansas taxpayer is NOT responsible for the financial support of the people who should not be here. Innocent though the young people may be, SO ARE THE TAXPAYERS; but Governor Huckabee does not HESITATE to 'punish' them in order that he might assuage his own guilt over 'punishing' people who belong in another country by sending them there.

Huckabee has the same eye disease suffered by every liberal of good character and decency; all money looks the same to him. He cannot distinguish between taxpayer funds and charitable contributions, and he imputes the moral goodness of charity to a taxpayer who has no say in how his money is used and who may well be in earnest opposition to a particular use.

This taxpayer is not only NOT being charitable, he is being ABUSED.

This nation is the most charitable in the history of humankind. Any real, honestly good cause can find support. It only needs honest and motivated people to speak for it and direct their passions toward its purposes.

But use of taxpayer funds for purposes directly opposed by the vast majority of taxpayers smacks of fiduciary irresponsibility at best; at worst, it is a short step away from democracy, the kind of step which is usually followed by many others.

Saturday, December 1, 2007

In the Dallas Morning News today, 12/1/07, written by Christy Hoppe of the Austin bureau, is a story headlined "Cushy Meeting, Tough Season".

It purports to inform the News reader about the Republican Governors' meeting in Dana Point, California, a 'small resort town' which she takes pains to point out is near Richard Nixon's 'western White House' in San Clemente.

Yes, Christy, you've stumbled upon the evil truth; the location near San Clemente was no accident. During a lull in the cushy meeting, some of the members will go up the road and put on their black robes and hoods and and conduct an evil secret ritual Nixon-worship ceremony.

She takes other pains as well--

".. the five star St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort... looks like a dealership for black SUVs.. "

Whereas everyone knows your socially conscious Democrat governor prefers to travel in a bulletproof Prius with very small security guards....

Republican governors are 'carrying the burdens of office... and maybe a few golf bags... "

I began to wonder at that point whether the Democrat governors' meeting would be at the Greyhound Bus station in Trenton, New Jersey (great snack-bar food), but of course Christy was ready to enlighten me on that as well....

"Democratic governors will meet for a spring policy confab in Big Sky, Montana in March.. their efforts are somewhat dwarfed by their Republican counterparts in terms of cushy... " Well, what does she expect? Republicans always make better efforts than Democrats. :-)

"the GOP governors traverse long hallways of travertine marble... " (clever girl, using 'traverse' and 'travertine' in the same sentence... she's probably the very first journalist to achieve this... I sure hope her fellow journalists congratulate her on her clever and skillful cleverness and skillfulness.)

"Yes, it's swank, but it also provides ample niches for corporate members ready to jump out and shake their hands..." I know for a fact that the members of MY country club lurk in the art niches waiting for politicians to pass by.. I've SEEN them do it. The fat ones have to remove the statues so there's enough room in the niches for lurking. And most of them are fat.

Unsatisfied with her previous efforts to mock Republican governors for playing golf, she returns to it-- "there is some hard hitting -- including golf balls -- and some straight shooting --- including skeet." Dastardly NRA members, one and all, these evil rich Republican golfer-nors. Gun control means hitting what you aim at, dang it.

The class-warfare dreck continues and worsens-- "... arrived in corporate jets borrowed for them by the governors association.. ", "... endured hardship: the annual state dinner of filet mignon and wine forced many of them to miss the Cowboys-Packers game... ", "manicured hedges, soothing fountains.. bluff views of the Pacific Ocean... "

This exercise in unambiguous wealth-mocking ended with "if the political rookies can survive the election, the association can promise there's a spa treatment waiting for them at the annual meeting". Oh, Christy, now you're sounding just plain jealous. A little mud-pack mud-slinging??

Even for an editorial, this is juvenile and snarky-- but it ISN'T AN OP-ED PIECE.

This is a news story, in the Texas and Southwest section of the Dallas Morning News.

Christy Hoppe is a walking, talking, typing and sniping example of the overt hard-left media bias that becomes more apparent by the day in our mainstream news outlets. It is no longer a matter of speculation; they seem to have become proud of it, and they are fearless in displaying it.

Another example?

An anchorette on MSNBC this week, talking about Bush and Sarkozy walking together, expressed a mocking adoration of Sarkozy, "who could not have a man-crush on this man?" Then she clarified... "I'm not talkin' about the monkey either, I'm talkin' about the other guy."

She went further... "you know, the monkey in the middle... ?" And the crew had a good laugh, a bit nervous at going this far but not willing to seriously draw a line and step back from it. Television anchors are now so comfortable with their backroom newsroom Bush-mocking, they're letting it fly on air without hesitation.

Just the two latest examples of the abandonment of any PRETENSE of 'factual neutrality', a canard they've thrown at us for decades to cover this truth; almost everyone in the news business is a Democrat voter and a leftist. Even Fox News is riddled with them, but there they are not the overwhelming majority; that is the ONLY news outfit about which this can be said.

I spent years in Europe watching the BBC and France 2 and CNN International, et j'ai eu beaucoup de colere at the blunt anti-American ugliness and the disrespect they displayed for the President of the United States.

Now our own television news is indistinguishable from the European version.

Let's be clear on this; Fox News was created becuse Murdoch's team saw a need, a desire among TV viewers to see a news channel that didn't act as a PR arm for the Democrat party.

The analysis was correct. Fox News meets a need, so well that it's the highest rated cable news channel in America.

Newspapers across the country are failing to meet the needs of readers and suffering for it, from ad revenue drops and readership reductions and layoffs (although they haven't yet closed the Austin bureau of the DMN). But newspapers also appear defiant and determined to remain liberal outposts and Democrat mouthpieces.

You'd think that in a business with so much money at stake and so many losses in the recent past and looming in the immediate future, the mainstream media would make an adjustment in their product to acknowledge the shift in the wishes of their audience.

Apparently, though, the political message is so important, they're going to go down with the ship.

While the Bush-Rice middle east fantasy plays out, it's good to remember that he is in fact a morally centered fellow who for the most part tends to do the right thing.

Hugh Hewitt at Townhall links to this column by Charles Krauthammer on the stem cell debate and the recent discoveries in that field. (Krauthammer, a paraplegic, is uniquely qualified to speak on the stem cell issue- ed.)

Laura Ingraham asks the question this week of Hillary, who says she wants abortion to be safe, legal and rare--"Why, then, do you want it to be rare? Is there any other constitutional right that anyone in politics wants exercised rarely?"

So Condi Rice knows what it's like to be a Jew. I'll buy that. American black people suffered many generations of persecution and violence, and it would be nitpicking to try to differentiate between the two; suffering is suffering and evil is evil.

But Condi "knows what it's like to be a Palestinian"????

Does she support the murder of white children and old men in shopping malls as an adjunct to gaining civil rights for blacks? Has she killed any white people herself, or voted for anyone who has done so or declared their intention to do so? Is she dedicated to the eradication and/or banishment of white people from Mississippi or Alabama, because of past injustices?

Instead of commissioner of the NFL, she should become the leader of the Black Panthers. Then we’d be sure she knows what it’s like to be a Palestinian.

In the Annapolis opening statement, Bush intoned that terrorism would not be accepted "whether from Palestinian or Israeli".

Leaving aside for the moment whether the Israelis have EVER practiced terrorism against the Palestinians, the conference went forward without any assurance from any party that they would even TRY to stop terrorism.

Abbas is the leader of Fatah. Fatah commits and sponsors more attacks against Israel than Hamas does! Fatah policemen had plotted to assassinate Ehud Olmert when he went to visit Abbas prior to this conference!

This is madness, and it will end badly. Bush and Rice appear to believe the leftist tripe that absence of war is the best possible condition of humanity.

History shows us that acting on this belief inevitably leads to the war they try to avoid. Human nature will not be denied.

I read somewhere that Arafat chose "Fatah" as the name of his party because the actual initials spelled out "Hataf" and that means "devil". The point will remain apocryphal until such time as I stumble across the item I originally read. :-)

Note that it makes much more money overseas than it does in the States, even though in the main it will lose money.

Dems often ask "why do they hate us?"

It's rhetorical, of course... Dems believe they know why we are hated, that it's because of Bush and aggression and imperialism and commercialism and all the things leftists have always hated about America.

So what do they do about the fact that we are 'hated'? They send off these movies from Hollywood that CONVINCE the other people of the world that we SHOULD be hated.

These movies play straight into the heart of anti-Americanism; they set the scene with premises that aren't accurate, then they portray Americans as underhanded and greedy and arrogant.

Except, of course, for the Noble College Professor Trying to Change the World, played by Robert Redford.

The Kingdom, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, Rendition, and doubtless some others still in the pipeline, all are films which do NOT accurately represent what America is doing, but DO overstate and mislead audiences to buy into anti-Americanism... and when the audience is in France or Turkey or Indonesia, they're READY to believe this junk. And they'll plunk down a few bucks to indulge themselves in confirmation-entertainment.

The article says the only big overseas markets that haven't seen the movie yet are Japan and Italy. It also says the overseas haul is considerably larger than the domestic tally.

This means the markets that serve Islam have already had the chance to see this movie, which explains why the overseas box office is bigger.

Many a young muslim man has seen or will see this and other anti-American and anti-war movies. The movies will confirm in his mind that his opinion is the valid one, the opinion of superior people like movie stars, and perhaps the solidifying of this opinion will also firm up his commitment.

And he will kill on that commitment.

These movies cause deaths of innocents. Common sense says so. The producers and the stars cannot help but understand this.

They claim that our actions cause terrorism to increase, but don't THEIR actions have a little something to do with it?

Osama bin Laden has made a new audiotape, a speech to Europeans, practically begging them to recover the former vigor of their opposition to Bush.

And it isn't just the new tape you've heard about in the news.... bin Laden has a new video circulating in which he proudly claims sole credit for the attacks of 9/11, saying we did it, I'm responsible, I kill their innocents, yada yada.

Note to Troofers-- Unless Osama bin Laden has large ballistic missiles and knows how to carefully demolish buildings, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were hit by airplanes piloted by al Qaeda members.

Note to anti-Semites like Michael Scheuer-- the Jews DIDN'T do it.

Note to BDS sufferers-- BUSH DIDN'T DO IT.

Bin Laden did it.

Unless, of course, you believe he is part of a conspiracy to make us believe he did it, to take the pressure off the Jews and Bush.

Now that we know at least eight of the questioners on the CNN YouTube Republican primary debate this week were historically hostile to Republicans, Democrat activists or actual Democrat campaign operatives, we wonder how well CNN prepared for this.

In other words, is this an example of media bias or media incompetence? Either is disastrous for CNN and the MSM in general, whose primary defense against the rise of the blogger is that "we are professionals and we check our facts", while bloggers are nerds in their pajamas blogging in their living rooms.

If this is an example of carefully prepared programming, CNN is an arm of the Democrat party.

If it is an example of unprepared programming, CNN might as well send out a memo to all employees to put on their pajamas and stay in their living rooms.

Here is an interview with David Bohrman, Washington bureau chief for CNN and the executive producer of this debate. It appeared on the New York Times website prior to the debate, and in it Bohrman specifically says they are addressing and removing potential Democrat questioners trying to worm their way in and embarrass Republican primary candidates:

“There are quite a few things you might describe as Democratic ‘gotchas,’ and we are weeding those out,” Mr. Bohrman said. CNN wants to ensure that next Wednesday’s Republican event is “a debate of their party.”

Clearly CNN wanted the public to know that it was well aware that this was happening and was vetting videos with this in mind.

I submit, Milud, that CNN is NOT guilty of incompetence and IS guilty of agenda journalism of a nature so obvious and shocking that-- aw, never mind.

It's not shocking. Its just another nail in the coffin lid that is slamming shut on the MSM, briskly whipping off their phony veil of 'factual neutrality'.

Reporters and journalists are now trusted less by the general public than used car dealers. This is yet another manifestation of the reason.

The New York Times' stock shares are worth less than half of what they were a few years ago, and have recently been downgraded by a major brokerage house-- to SELL.

Readership of major papers diminishes on average between 5 and 10% a year, while the American population count continues to rise.

Fox News continues to massacre all the other cable news networks, and major network news audiences continue to diminish.

And Dan Rather still believes the documents were real and the story was true. No kidding.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

A comment appeared below this post purporting to be from Bob Moffitt, a PR guy for the Minnesota state American Lung Association organisation. He takes umbrage at the assertions in the article I examined here, that the ALA is concerned about a particular pollutant from the burning of gasoline and ethanol together.

For more on Mr. Moffitt and his relationship to the ALA of the upper midwest and/or the ALA in general, look here-

all is not, as usual, what it seems. :-)) Moffitt does not actually say the WSJ's assertion about the ALA is inaccurate, only that his organisation is not a critic of biofuels (a point the WSJ didn't actually make). He says the ALA recognizes that 'alternative fuels can play an important role in the reduction of fossil fuel use' and that 'they can vary widely on their impact on lung health because of their composition and application'.

For enlightenment on that first part, just read the WSJ article itself. As to the second part, it supports rather than opposes the WSJ's assertion about what the ALA said. In the end, I'm not sure why Mr. Moffitt bothered to post here.

Like I said in this original post, the energy problem is essentially leftism, not energy. A guy from Minnesota (a state experiencing paroxysms of silly leftism at present) showing up here for disputation sort of illustrates my point.

Meanwhile, on with my original post, whose content I am not the least bit convinced by Mr. Moffitt to alter:

**************************************Ethanol, from panacea to pariah in one year.

"Little over a year ago, ethanol was winning the hearts and wallets of both main street and wall street"

In the span of one growing season, the Journal says ethanol critics complain it pushes up food prices, has questionable green bona fides and that it doesn't reduce the need for oil nearly as much as its proponents said it would.

Even the American Lung Association has gotten into the act, expressing concern about a certain air pollutant arising from the burning of a mix of ethanol and gasoline. And an outside expert working for the UN has said that the food price inflation resulting from using food as fuel is a 'crime against humanity' because of the burden on the poor.

Remember the tortilla riots down south, last year? The price of corn tortillas had tripled in a short time, and folks were understandably upset.

And the National Academy of Sciences says the business of corn crops for ethanol could strain water supplies for irrigation.

Naturally, America is the biggest producer of ethanol and has the most to lose in the form of futures investments, stock prices of related companies, etc. Whole communities in farming areas are now economically based on ethanol production through their crops.

There's a lot to lose when the fairy tale ends, when the unreality of political correctness comes home to roost in the form of painful economic REALITY.

The fact is, there is only one economically VIABLE substitute for oil at this time in the history of the planet, and that's NUCLEAR power.

But leftists won't let us build new plants. Even though there's only been one accident in the past thirty years, and it was in Russia, at a plant which was built with old technology even then.

Many nuclear plants, even those with that old technology, still soldier on around the world, working well, providing clean safe electricity to power those future electric cars we're all supposed to be driving.. and imagine how much better the NEW plants would be, with new efficient technologies and new computerized redundant safety systems.... and yet, we can't build new plants.

Nor can we drill in Alaska, or off the coast of Florida, or in California.... the leftists complain about high gas prices but will NOT address the supply issue that causes them.

Heck, they won't even let us build new REFINERIES, even though these have as much to do with gas supply crunches and sudden pump price increases as the supply of oil does....

It's clear to me, given the new acknowledgement of ethanol's miserable failure (which I predicted last year), that the chief obstacle to America-- and the world-- having all the safe, low priced power it wants is... LEFTISTS.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

I've often said, when conversations are steered to evil Big Oil, that they aren't so much oil companies as ENERGY companies, and oil is the most economic form of energy at present... so they produce oil...

But in opposition to liberals who want to tax us so government can research alternative energy, I've always said that big oil companies are already doing that research, more efficiently than government, WITHOUT taxing people.. because energy companies want to sell you energy 20 years from now just like they do today...

Conspiracy theorists and leftists (redundancy?) want to believe that EEEeevillll big oil is somehow covering up alternative energy possibilities so they can keep making money on oil.. but actually, they're doing the research and trying to DISCOVER opportunities, so that when profit is made, it goes to THEM.

The American Way. Let 'em do it. And if new and different ways of powering this world are not yet economically feasible, trust the people with the most at stake to be ahead of the game and ready with the new products. ExxonMobil wants to sell you energy even when it isn't oil anymore. That's how they'll stay in business when the oil's gone.

I just finished "Lone Survivor" by Marcus Luttrell, the one man who came back from the gut-wrenching loss of Seal Team 10 in Afghanistan two years ago.

There are no words to describe the intensity of this story; every one of those men deserves a medal of honor in my view, not least Luttrell, who fought and killed many of the enemy while wounded and dying of thirst himself; with help from locals who had integrity and knew good from evil, he returned to his family, 'came back from the dead'....

He'd been shot, he'd fallen off a mountain more than once, he'd been beaten by terrorists while lying wounded, and he'd endured watching the deaths of all of his closest friends.

Now, two years later, he's gone back on active duty with the Seals. He had fractured vertebrae and a broken wrist, among other injuries. He admits he's not as tough as he was before the injuries, but he's still tough enough. He insists on keeping to his contract with the Navy, even though President Bush himself would have let him out of it.

I wept like a schoolgirl reading this thing. (not intended as an offense to schoolgirls)

I immediately wanted to know if it had been purchased by any studios to make a movie of it.

And it has, just in the last month, come out of a bidding war with studios. It was not optioned, it was bought outright. And in that bidding war, Spielberg lost. Universal Studios got it.

That's how big this is going to be.

Is this the first PRO American, pro Iraq war movie? Will there be leftist overtones? Will they cast Cruise or Penn or Robbins or any well known leftists as Seal team members?

Will Michael Moore be cast as an Afghan mountainside?

Peter Berg will direct. He did "The Kingdom" and worked with real Seals on set, and apparently he bonded with Luttrell when they visited.

On the surface, it's obvious to sensible people why the anti-war movies of these past couple of years are failing so miserably.

It's because most people don't share the sentiments expressed by them. Most people don't believe our troops are evil or morally compromised, and most people understand the Islamist terrorists ARE evil and need to be fought. Hollywood is just plain wrong on their premises, and to be attractive as a story, a movie must be a story that can be morally understood by ordinary people.

But this issue is more complex than it might seem, and there's nobody better to unravel the complexity than a former Hollywood denizen, a screenwriter, one of THEM...

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

UPDATE: This story says it all-- note down in the middle, where the writer implies that poverty and minority status are the causes of the anger. That argument is SO over, SO 1970's.

IT'S THE ISLAMISTS, STUPID.

*************************************************

Just like two summers ago, an incident that was unavoidable has been turned into a cause for rioting by 'youths' whose appearance, culture, race, and even skin color, are seldom mentioned in the press.

Apparently two boys on a small (illegally small, in fact) motorcycle ran it into a police car, and they both died.

Now Michelle Malkin has the latest, including a rare sighting of an accurate description of the 'youths' in the press. Rest assured it won't happen again. :-)

One young man exclaims "this is war... we want at least two policemen dead"....

I have news for him; if it was war, he would be running from soldiers shooting at him. It isn't war, it's simple violence and thuggery from him and his 'youth' friends.

And it's part of a long term plan among radical Muslims to cow Europeans into accepting their increasingly important place in Euro society, culminating a generation from now in Islamic numerical supremacy and Islamic government.

One man, one vote, once. When Islamists are in the majority, they'll be elected into control of local and national governments, and then elections will cease and Imams will rule.

The more scenes of violence, flames and destruction we see, the closer it all seems.

Hmm... certain creatures mutate in ways that are not beneficial to their species, and as a result the mutation is snuffed out when the creatures die. They can't compete in nature, they are sub-par, they are overwhelmed by better qualified and more capable creatures.

The young lady who had herself sterilized to save the planet had felt strongly about doing this from a young age, and tells of her dismay when the first doc she consulted said she shouldn't do it because she might change her mind--

"I found it insulting that she thought that, just because I was a woman, I'd reach a point where an urge to breed would overcome all rational thought."

Um, yeah... I'm not sure 'rational thought' is the first description that springs to a reader's mind here... but hey, at least that's one less poor stressed kid who has to grow up with a leftist envirowacko mom... :-)

As I am the editor in chief (as well as the entire staff of journalists and the E-paper boy) here at DavoGrande, I can and do write what I want. :-)

I've been participating in a discussion about Mike Huckabee with a small group of emailers, and took the position that Huckabee was uncomfortably liberal in his view of how tax dollars should be used to 'help the needy'. I made the point that charity and government programs are not only not the same thing, but can be considered opposites, in that charity springs from the good will and volunteerism of the individual, while taxpayer funds for programs fail the 'charity' test; they do not spring from the good will of the taxpayer. Often the taxpayer is specifically against the program on which his money is spent, and thus it is uncomfortably like stealing, taking from him against his will for purposes of which he knows nothing or else to which he is opposed.

An emailer responded that the sort of thing I'm talking about sounds like real Christianity, and cited a couple of Biblical stories to show that Jesus was against capitalism and private property; he pointed at Jesus' words to rich people, eye of the needle, sell everything and give the money to the poor, etc.

I responded heartily, and will reproduce that here in case you're interested--

This is simply not true. Jesus did not issue a proclamation that Christians shouldn't own anything or earn anything. This biz of the eye of the needle and the rich man's difficulty going to heaven or being perfect were LESSONS, about the weakness and sinfulness of individuals, about how easy it is to rely on other things instead of God.

His whole point was that human beings (even the 'best' of them, by any measure) cannot be perfect and cannot earn their way to God's kingdom. He was preparing people, remember, to understand His future death on the cross. He needed to teach them that they simply COULD NOT be perfect, so they'd know exactly what He accomplished when He died on the cross.

This is Christian central station here. It's what Christianity IS.

Christianity is not monastic ascetiscism or communism. It is simply rearranging of human priorities, making God the most important thing in your life instead of wealth or happiness or other such temporary things, can't take it with you, yada yada.

And He was right, it is damn hard to quit relying on things and start relying on God. That's probably why so often we see people who go from something to nothing, to the bottom of their barrel, and then declare they're born again. Chuck Colson is a great example, a hotshot Washington guy who had it all, then went down in flames at Watergate and came out of prison a born again guy who has done nothing but good works in prison ministry ever since. There are lots of phony celebrity come-to-Jesus events, but the many real such events seldom attract attention.

Rich people make great Christians, and I know some, multimillionaires who donate millions to good causes and don't ask for props. That's real Christianity, giving it away in God's name, and it happens a lot.

Jesus only meant that being rich carries its own set of temptations and difficulties, not that one couldn't be rich and still be a Christian. To be a good steward, to make money and to make your money make money, is good-- provided you live by basic principles and you give a lot away. It's the hoarders and the venal and the corrupt and the competitive He's talking to, and of course to those tendencies in all of us.

The rich guy who walked away sad? The guy was asking what he had to do to be perfect, and claiming he had done it all already. Jesus gave him one more test of faith, to give away everything he has and follow Him, and the guy couldn't do it. The lesson was as much to the crowd as to the guy-- see, no matter how hard you try to be perfect, there's always the thing that holds you back. NOBODY'S PERFECT.

Not that rich guys are automatically failed Christians, but that they are held back by their love of money. It's the LOVE of money He's saying we have to overcome, not the HAVING of it. How can you be generous in the name of Jesus if you are ascetic in the name of Jesus?

It is obvious that there is selectivity in the media, a choice as to which stories they believe will draw the most attention and thus the highest ratings on which to base their ad sales.

And that's ugly... because whether their assumptions are accurate or not, their conclusion is that we the vast red state viewing audience prefer to agonize over missing blonde princesses rather than women, or men, of other races or looks or ages.

They DO get good ratings on those shows, but 'good ratings' is a subjective thing, and it really isn't that many people. A million people watching a show is a big deal in the world of cable, and that means for every American watching, there are 299 with better things to do. And they don't often even get a million on those 'missing white woman' shows.

But for myself, I don't think that's the primary reason the MSM avoids stories on missing black women.

I believe the reason we don't see stories about the Latasha Normans of the world is because someone somewhere in the decision-making structure of our media is afraid that the person responsible for the missing black woman is a black MAN, and thus they might be forced to air lots of shocking stories on the evil and bestial nature of an African American male.

He, of course, is their preferred VICTIM, not the guilty party (remember Tookie?). It goes against the liberal press agenda.

And once again the party of compassion shows that, at its heart, it doesn't give a damn about actual people, even the ones it is supposed to be defending from the evil conservatives (yes, I picked on Greta for the title of this post-- Fox isn't a 'conservative' channel, merely a less liberal one, and Greta's been around longer than Fox News has, and was on CNN doing the same thing she does now).

I would think that one of the areas of responsibility the media would accept and welcome would be the responsibility to help solve crimes and rescue people in danger. I would think that there would be entire cable channels devoted to this, that media companies would be willing to LOSE MONEY to perform this vital function of spreading information in order to help find good conclusions for matters such as these.

I know from my 27 years of radio broadcasting that informing the public was (probably still is) considered mandatory for radio stations. The FCC required us to do a nominal amount of that in order to retain licenses. And what is an Amber Alert if not a recognition that broadcasting requires attention to the immediate needs of the public?

I wonder if they'll find her body, catch and imprison the killer, sigh sadly, and name some new alert after Latasha Norman. Too late to help save her. But Natalie Holloway, who's been dead for many months, still gets the face time on TV.

Tax law cannot be altered without real world consequences. Every time you alter taxes, you affect the activity you're taxing, even if the target (in this case big oil) seems to have unlimited money.

If you lower taxes, the activity increases, which explains why our government revenues in this country have set new records each of the past several years. The Bush tax cuts have fueled an uproariously good economy, and more business means more taxes collected, even at lower rates.

One thing is for sure; even if the people you're trying to tax actually have the money (and in this case they do, for now), you can rest assured they won't just hand it over without a fight.

This reminds me of the 1993 (or was it 1992?) congressional bright idea of a 10% tax on luxury yachts. 10% on top of the price of a million dollar yacht? SURE. Those rich guys can afford this. They won't even blink! Easy money.

Within a couple of years the builders of luxury yachts were going out of business for lack of sales, and hundreds (or thousands) of ordinary fiberglass workers and electricians and carpenters and painters were going home unemployed, adding to government (taxpayer) expense of unemployment payments.

Meanwhile the USED luxury yacht market, which had NOT been taxed this way, was flourishing, and yacht brokers were making as much money as ever while rich people were buying as many luxury yachts as ever; it was only the regular guy, the worker, who got hammered, and the government collected almost NO MONEY and had to pay out MORE money on unemployment.

Tax a behavior and you reduce it.

Even the big oil companies trying to produce oil in Alaska will walk away when the state government tries to hike their taxes arbitrarily-- because hey, they can afford it, they're big oil, they won't even blink, easy money, heh heh...

My guess is, the state government has already decided where to spend the money, and now they're going to be hard pressed to find it somewhere else.

What's next, a government diktat forcing companies to do business in your state? Will they declare the closing of a business to be tantamount to nonpayment of future taxes and use the law to force businesses to keep doing business?

Don't laugh-- I was in Brussels for several years, and a big British clothier named Marks and Spencer had a store there, and one (or several) in France. (I liked Marks and Spencer, because they sold pants that fit me.)

One day I read in the paper that they were closing their Belgian and French stores for lack of business, because they were losing money-- and the French government responded by passing a law FORBIDDING BUSINESSES TO CLOSE UP SHOP WITHOUT GOVERNMENT PERMISSION.

You can be sure that corporate slavery will be quickly followed by individual slavery.

Fortunately the French have had a mass vision of the error of their ways, and are in the painful process of correction from socialism.

I hope we don't go down that road and pass them going back the other way.